realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm, delicate consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained in the face of imminent destruction....  In that category none was sharper than the charm of a woman, soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly.”  It is as the poet musing upon the fleet passage of beauty rather than as the satirist mocking at the vanity of human wishes that Mr. Hergesheimer traces the career of Linda Condon; but both poet and satirist meet in his masterpiece.

A woman as lovely as a lyric, she is almost as insensible as a steel blade or a bright star.  The true marvel is that beauty so cold can provoke such conflagrations.  Granted—­and certain subtle women decline to grant it—­that Linda with her shining emptiness could have kindled the passion she kindles in the story, what must be the blackness of her discovery that when her beauty goes she will have left none of the generous affection which, had she herself given it through life, she might by this time have earned in quantities sufficient to endow and compensate her for old age!  Mr. Hergesheimer does not soften the blow when it comes—­he even adds to her agony the clear consciousness that she cannot feel her plight as more passionate natures might.  But he allows her, at the last, an intimation of immortality.  From her unresponding beauty, she sees, her sculptor lover has caught a madness eventually sublimated to a Platonic vision which, partially forgetful of her as an individual, has made him and his works great.  Without, in the common way, modeling her at all, he has snared the essence of her spirit and has set it—­as such mortal things go—­everlastingly in bronze.

If Mr. Hergesheimer offers Linda in the end only the hard comfort of a perception come at largely through her intellect, still as far as the art of his novel is concerned he has immensely gained by his refusal to make any trivial concession to natural weaknesses.  His latest conclusion is his best. The Lay Anthony ends in accident, Mountain Blood in melodrama; The Three Black Pennys, more successful than its predecessors, fades out like the Penny line; Java Head turns sharply away from its central theme, almost as if Hamlet should concern itself during a final scene with Horatio’s personal perplexities.  Now the conclusions of a novelist are on the whole the test of his judgment and his honesty; and it promises much for fiction that Mr. Hergesheimer has advanced so steadily in this respect through his seven books.

He has advanced, too, in his use of decoration, which reached its most sumptuous in Java Head and which in Linda Condon happily began to show a more austere control.  The question which criticism asks is whether Mr. Hergesheimer has not gone as far as a practitioner of the decorative arts can go, and whether he ought not, during the remainder of the eminent career which awaits him, to work rather in